Irish voters on Friday repealed the country’s eighth constitutional amendment, a decade's long ban on abortion that had forced thousands of women to either illegally order abortion pills online or travel to the United Kingdom to access the procedure.
The landmark referendum heralds a new era for women’s rights in a government that for centuries operated as a theocracy. Ireland’s parliament is now expected to write a more liberal law on the procedure, which will likely allow a woman to complete an abortion until up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The legalization of abortion in Ireland delivers a huge blow to the global anti-abortion movement, which had looked to the Western country’s near-total ban on the procedure as a beacon for other efforts around the world. International religious and anti-abortion groups ― many of them American ― had poured money and resources into a sophisticated digital campaign to uphold the ban in Ireland.
Ireland is one of the richest countries in the world, but since adopting the eighth amendment in 1983 it has banned abortion except to save the life of the mother. The most infamous case is that of Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist who died in 2012 from complications related to a septic miscarriage. Her medical team had denied her request for an abortion at 17 weeks of pregnancy.
Source : Huff Post
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